In Anthem, by Ayn Rand, the leaders not only enslaved the bodies of their people, but they also destroyed their minds and had seek to accomplish a tyrannical end. The leaders of Equality 7-251’s community took control of the bodies and mind of the citizens, by completely brainwashing them from the day that they
were born. The people didn’t try to fight back nor escape because they didn’t know that the way they were living is wrong or that there was any other way to live. By making it a sin to be an individual they didn’t have to worry about those who were smart, figure out the truth.
From the day that they were born every baby was taken to the house of infantry without ever getting to see their parents. Then as they grew older they are sent to different houses, at different stages of their lives, and once they turn of age they are sent to have a baby with someone they do not know and the cycle continues. Without the love and care of parents, the children grow to never know love so their whole world is loveless. Which makes it safe and easier for the leaders to control them.
They never have normal experiences like privacy.
They sleep in a room of one hundred beds and are never allowed to be alone. They are told it is a sin to be an individual. They speak in third-person and do not use the word ”I”. Not allowing them to be individual means not allowing them to ever think for them. They will follow everything the leaders say if they do not have pride in themselves so they were never allowed to see there own reflection. They weren’t even allowed to have their own names; everyone who lived in the house got one name then a number. The most important reason individualism is not allowed, is because individualism is the key to ego.
Ego is the one word of which all people were forbidden to speak of. Afraid of them forming ego’s the leaders made their lives so strict and cut so many things out, because ego is said to be “a person as thinking, feeling, and willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from objects of its thought.” The one thing the leaders didn’t want the most was for any one to be different from anyone else. That would ruin the plan of their tyrannical end.